Okay, this term is used in psychology, but it's useful.
And it's something I'd like to see in games but have no idea how to pull off.
Functional Polyvalence says that, in order for a story's solution to make sense or feel "satisfying" it has to tie up as many story elements as possible.
It has been suggested, in fact, that the more loose ends, puzzling hints, emotional responses and narrative threads that a solution introduced into any point in a plot addresses (not neccessarily resolves) then the better it works on the human psyche.
This is because our brains kind of use stories to make sense of things. We do it by chopping the world of our senses in little tiny sub-stories (I went outside. You ate an apple. She got hit in the head by a baseball.) and analyzing them in two ways: by time (which came first) and by association (which are related.) That's the root of causality.
So any act in a story really hits home for us if it links those little sub-stories together.
I've seen games approach this, perhaps without intending to do so. Brainstorming trees or lists of significant elements with connecting lines speak volumes to some players.
But what could make tying little chunks of story together with one big action worthwhile to the players of a game?
I've seen moments like that. Not necessarily that *all* the pieces tie together, but when things created disparately come together, it's a beautiful thing. It seems like it functions similarly to reincorporation. Why is it satisfying? I think because of how we tend to see patterns in nature, it is an aesthetic quality, or a quality of aesthetics. Pattern is beautiful. And when things tie up, or tie together, it feeds into our sense of "rightness". This, I think, is why foreshadowing is a necessary part of storytelling. Or an important, if not necessary. Since we have been fed a cue earlier on saying that "this will happen" when it does, it is satisfying.
I just wondered if there was a way to formalize it.
I tend to be reward-oriented in my gaming tastes, so I prefer to grant some kind of concrete reward for addressing more than one issue with a solution.
Reincorporation seems like the right idea, certainly. As an improv technique, being aware of previous material added and bringing it back up again does give that neccessary sense of the progression of an idea through time.